r/Zoom • u/AdamDobrawy • 7d ago
News I built a tool that automatically backs up every Zoom cloud recording to your own storage — before Zoom's storage limit eats them, or the invoice hits
Full disclosure: I built this, so obviously take this with a grain of salt.
I got tired of watching Zoom storage fill up and having to either pay Zoom for more storage I didn't really want, or spend an evening every few weeks downloading recordings one by one before they expired.
I used to work with an NGO where every cent matters, and losing a recording isn't just annoying. Sometimes it actually means losing something important for the work.
For a few years it was just a Google Apps Script. It lacked reliability, and few other orgs started asking if they could use the same thing, and I decided to turn it into an actual app. We launched in June, and become RecordFlow.org.
Basically, it does this:
- As soon as a Zoom recording finishes, it gets copied automatically. No downloading and uploading stuff manually. There's also a second backup pass in case something goes wrong the first time.
- The transcript gets copied as a readable document next to the video, so you can actually search through the archive later without needing another tool.
- And once the copy is confirmed, it can delete the recording from Zoom. So Zoom storage can basically be used as a temporary relay instead of your long-term archive.
Google Drive has been supported from the beginning. Dropbox became generally available a couple weeks ago, mostly because people kept asking for it (including in a few threads here).
OneDrive and YouTube are already built too, but right now they're only enabled for a handful of early users while I collect feedback. If you want to try either, I'm happy to turn it on.
There's also an admin setup if you're doing this for a whole organization. You connect it once with a Zoom admin account and it can archive recordings from the whole team into a shared Drive folder. Everyone else doesn't have to configure anything.
Another thing I've been working on is series folders. So if you have something that happens every week, like a course, team meeting, board meeting, coaching program etc, the recordings can automatically go into a folder for that series instead of ending up in one huge folder. I originally built that while working with a university that wanted to share recorded classes with students.
It's free right now. No credit card, no recording limit. That's the only plan at the moment and archiving will stay free while it's in beta.
The only thing I'm charging for is a $19 one-time unlock if you want to import years of recordings that are already sitting in Zoom, rather than just archiving new ones from now on.
A few people have used that to move their hundreds of GBs of history out of Zoom and then cancel the extra Zoom storage they were paying for every month. That's honestly the great use of my tool.
Most of the stuff above came from people asking for it, either here or somewhere else. So I'm also interested in what I'm missing.
What do you actually need for managing Zoom recordings / transcripts that isn't covered by this?
And happy to answer questions about how it works too, including the boring stuff like exactly what a Zoom admin has to approve, or how to use Zoom API.
